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Baffler Archives: Salvos

Columns

Keep Fear Alive
Can we imagine a free and peaceful country? A civil society that recognizes rights and security as complementary forces, rather than polar opposites? Terrorist attacks frighten us, as they are designed to. But when terrorism strikes the United States, we’re never urged to ...

Boys Will Be Men
The first time I heard about Tucker Max I was still finishing up college, vaguely toying with the idea of getting a master’s degree in gender studies. But here, it seemed, was a popcult phenom who was itching to give me—and women the world over—an alpha-dude-docented crash ...

Against Activism
Almost a decade ago I attended a conference called “1968” at a nondescript college in New Jersey. Mark Rudd, a student radical turned community college math instructor living out his retirement in New Mexico, delivered the keynote. Taking the podium, he reflected critically ...

Everybody Freeze!
March 08, 2016
Narratives are made by the artful omission of facts. Never was this maxim more evident than in a gullible feature story that landed on the front page of the New York Times last fall, about a young woman’s last-ditch bid for life extension as she succumbed to the ravages of ...

They Made Him a Moron
One day in October 2009, I received an email from the office of Alec Ross, then the innovation adviser to Hillary Clinton. Informing me that my writing on technology and global affairs had attracted considerable interest at the State Department, the email mentioned that Ross ...

The Rest Is Advertising
Recently, I landed the tech-journalism equivalent of a Thomas Pynchon interview: I got someone from Twitter to answer my call. Notorious for keeping its communications department locked up tight, Twitter is not only the psychic bellwether and newswire for the media industry, but ...

Sacramento Shakedown
Back in the fall of 2014, Sacramento mayor Kevin Johnson was unstoppable. He’d pushed through a $300 million city subsidy for a new downtown arena for the Sacramento Kings. He’d helped elbow out racist Los Angeles Clippers team owner Donald Sterling, and grabbed a little of ...

Distressed Cut-Offs
November 03, 2015
How convenient for capitalism that the self morphed so easily into the cellphone. The doomed and dying use selfie sticks to record their every car accident and shark encounter. But the web is also awash with cheery self-promotion, from glossy offerings like Comedians in Cars ...

Paterfamilias, Kaput
The August leak of thirty-plus gigabytes of data—customer email addresses and credit card records, company emails, salary and bank information, source code, at least one film treatment—from Ashley Madison, the pro-infidelity dating site, brought the cultural logic of the ...

The Children’s Hour
Amid a slew of golden anniversaries this year marking signature achievements of the civil rights movement, it was easy to overlook the fiftieth birthday of a slim document titled “The Negro Family: The Case for National Action.” The 1965 study, which soon became known as the ...

Clans of the Cathode
November 03, 2015
Picture the slightly peculiar arrangement of the living-room furniture on almost any vintage sitcom with a primarily domestic setting, from One Day at a Time to Roseanne. Even if you’ve never consciously thought about it, you’ll soon realize which omitted staple of real-life ...

Memoirs of a Revolutionary’s Daughter
November 03, 2015
On January 25, 1983, at about nine o’clock in the evening, my father and twenty-one of his friends were led onto a snowy soccer pitch in Amol, a small town by the Caspian Sea. There, the Iranian government executed them by firing squad following a three-week trial, which was ...